Oscar Hijuelos - Beautiful María of My Soul

A month went by. One evening, at dusk, Teresita looked out her window and saw them sitting inside his DeVille. He was gesticulating wildly, while María, her arms folded across her lap, didn’t move at all. Until she slapped him in the face and, as María later put it to Teresita, told him to shove his own fingers up his ass. Shortly, as María stepped onto the pavement, he drove off, tossing into the street a bouquet of flowers, which María didn’t bother to pick up.

And that was the last of Rafael.

IT HARDLY RUFFLED MARÍA’S FEATHERS, HOWEVER. THAT SAME evening, after dinner, she sat by their kitchen table pouring herself a cup of red Spanish wine. Sitting across from her, Teresita put aside a school notebook she had been writing in. “Mama, can I ask you something?”

“Of course, mi vida.”

“That man, Rafael-did you even really care about him?”

María laughed. “Are you kidding me? I liked him all right, but did I fall in love with him, is that what you’re asking me? No, por Dios, no! And even if I did, what difference would that make? What is love between a man and a woman anyway, pero un vapor? Something that comes and goes like the air.”

Snubbing out her cigarette, María held out her arms to her daughter. “Come here, querida,” she said, and Teresita went to her side. That’s when María smothered her with kisses, repeating, as she stroked Teresita’s hair: “It’s you I love-mi Teresita, mi buena-and no one else. Never, never forget that, hija. The hell with everyone else!”

But to say that love was air and to really believe it, deep down, were two different things. For, in the quietude of her bedroom, beautiful María had more than her share of wistful moments, even if there had been others who had come along: The manager of a movie house. A much younger dance instructor she’d met at the Biltmore in Coral Gables, where she sometimes gave group lessons to the tourists. An accountant, missing two front teeth, his jackets flecked with dandruff, had helped her sort through the chaos of her dance studio receipts and was a very nice fellow indeed, but too attached to his overbearing mother and therefore too controlled and timid for her taste. (“That one, Félix,” she told her daughter, “wanted me to be just like his mamá.”) A construction contractor, who did some work on the house and, without children, left her because she was not of that fecund age anymore. And there were others. Cubans all, they came and went as momentary diversions; a few she took to bed, most often in obscure motels, but never with any expectation of receiving the affections she had known during her juventud in Cuba. (Oh, but papí, y Nestor, y Ignacio-yes, even Ignacio!) In the end, they meant very little to her, and since Teresita, sizing them up, rarely seemed pleased when she brought any of those men home, beautiful María hardly cared about their value as potential step-papitos. Occasionally, she considered remarrying-a few had proposed-but since she was more or less comodita-most comfortably disposed-in the house that Gustavo had left her, and could not really see herself making room for someone else, despite her loneliness, the notion somehow held out no appeal for her.

BY HER FIFTIES, MARÍA HAD STARTED TO FEEL HER YEARS. SHE still turned heads, but more so, as time went on, from a distance. Men continued to check her out, surely, but not as often as before; nor did men stare as long as they used to; the sensation that their eyes followed her all the way down the street vanished-a woman like María just knew. And, though she still looked very well preserved, even beautiful, María found herself feeling stunned by how much younger more and more people, both male and female, seemed to her.

Keeping her figure from the days of her youth largely intact by giving dance lessons from ten to five at the studio she had opened downtown and, swallowing her pride, the hour she spent twice weekly sweating away in a pink outfit on a treadmill at a nearby YWCA-where all the local Cuban women gathered in Jacuzzis afterwards to boast about their children and grandchildren-could not compensate for the inevitable and subtle changes of her features: not wrinkles but a general slackening of her skin, which so perturbed María that she took to dwelling more and more on newspaper ads for face tucks, and her cabinet filled with youth-restoring creams, rich with all kinds of so-called miracle enzymes, that she’d heard about on the radio. Yet as wonderful as María looked for her age, there was no concealing the passage of time, which could be read in her eyes, the future, and all its hopes and promises, having ceased to be the endless thing that had once shimmered so brightly in her pupils. Stripped of her illusions about what her romantic life would hold, María, like a character out of a bolero, began to think more and more about the past-how lovely it had been, no matter the difficulties she had endured. And once she did, the more she returned to her memories of that músico Nestor Castillo.

NOW AND THEN, ESPECIALLY DURING THE YEARS WHEN HER BRILLIANT daughter had left Miami to study medicine in New York and she would come from work and indulge in a few five-thirty cocktails, María, feeling lonely, not for men but for her Teresita’s companionship, would turn on their living room phonograph, an RCA console, and play the somewhat weathered Mambo Kings album she had happily found one afternoon at a neighborhood flea market for twenty-five cents. As if putting on a zarzuela or a symphony, she’d listen to each selection in order, from their raucously freewheeling, drum-and-horn-section-driven descargas to their songs of love, and always with the greatest sentimentality each time she heard Nestor’s sweet baritone voice, the climax, of course, reached with the last offering of Side A, “Beautiful María of My Soul.” Some evenings it gave her such a thrill that she’d put it on over and over again, the distance of time having made its melody seem even lovelier than before, and, despite her dislike of certain of its lyrics, she’d feel glorified, as if their love had been immortalized forever and forever, amen. But when she’d had too much to drink, and Nestor’s ghost filled the room, and the particulars of that irretrievable romance came back to her in such a way as to provoke the saddest of emotions, she’d cut it off, lest she begin to wallow in the kinds of sentiments that María still found painful.

(In that sort of mood, she’d recall the accusatory letter that Cesar Castillo had sent her. That her impulsive journey to New York in 1956 could have contributed, in any way, to Nestor’s passing was the sort of notion that sometimes made her jump up in her sleep, her heart beating rapidly, just like he used to make it. Then that guilt would sting her like a wasp, pains she would feel for days, until that too eventually faded.)

So María had to be careful, because even she, with her somewhat hardened shell, could find herself adrift on a sea of regrets. On such nights, she’d go through her cache of keepsakes-what were they but ordinary photographs, most of them fading, of her mamá and papito, of herself as a young beauty, and yes, of Nestor Castillo, that joven, whom she came to believe had been the love of her life: that which she had thrown away? In such a mood, she’d read his letters over again, and not just the tender ones but also those letters that overheated her skin with reminiscences of their lovemaking.

(If she could have seen Teresita’s expression one evening when she, home from Florida International University, had, out of curiosity, dug them out of her closet and read each and every one. My God! is what she had thought.)

Then months would go by without her once playing that song. And while María, at a certain hour, tuned in to Miami ’s Channel Five to see if that particular episode of I Love Lucy in which Nestor and his brother had appeared happened to be showing, for the most part she kept her little secret to herself. Teresita knew about it, and so did her former dancing colleague from the Lantern Club, Gladys, who, since moving to Miami from Havana, had become an occasional close companion. (They had spotted each other in a mall, around 1980, in the days just before Miami had gotten a little crazy over the influx of the Marielitos. It had been a happy reunion, and, yes, Gladys believed her when it came to that song-María had told her about Nestor.) But the few times María had mentioned this to anyone else, like her neighbors, her claim was met with more than a little skepticism. Because to call yourself the inspiration behind what Cubans of a certain generation had come to regard as something of a minor classic fell into a category of self-aggrandizement that only invited ridicule and, in María’s opinion, unspoken accusations of vanity and silliness.